My Own Ghost Story

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I love ghost stories, but I don’t believe such a thing exists. I love sci fi stories, but know faster-than-light travel doesn’t exist. But I have a ghost story of my own. Long ago and far away when I was in high school in upstate New York, I stayed with a friend overnight. Her house sat on nine acres in the country and had been built in the late 18th century. Her parents still live there. As is fairly common in rural areas of older areas of North America, the property has an old family (not her family) cemetery. To the best I can recall, about twenty people from the late 1700s and early 1800s are buried there. One group of graves holds multiple members of the same family who died about the same time, killed by the same disease. The night that I first stayed with her, in the middle of winter, my friend shared a large second-floor bedroom with her younger sister. Her father, who ran a plumber and heating business, was gradually remodeling the house. One door in the back of their bedroom was stuffed with rags because cold air seeped in from an unused room in back of the bedroom. I was curious and wanted to see the unused room. My friend obliged. The walls had been stripped, as had the ceiling and the floor. There were no curtains on the tall colonial-style windows, which looked out over snow. Since there was no electricity in the small room, the only light came from the bedroom. The same with the heat. It was cold and uninsulated. A white bag tied with a rope, holding what I assume was tools, hung from the exposed rafters. As we stood talking, shivering in our pajamas, we heard a low moan. We fled the room at speeds approaching the speed of light in a vacuum. ***** From the distance of years, I can see the low moan was probably a snow mobile in the distance. That night, it was a tortured soul.